Need help defining my style... should I do grayscales or B&W?

[rodrigohernadez]

Hi there! I've been working for a few months in a comic, Arcanas, and I'm having a bit of trouble in reaching my weekly deadline. Thinking about cuting work times, the first to go would be the grayscaling, but i'm a bit hesitant about doing that, beacuse i don't know if the overall quality suffers from the lack of midtones or not.

Here is a page with grays...

and here is the last one i made, without.

So, the question is, should i go the extra mile to add midtones even if my posting time suffers, or can i do without?
Thanks in advance for your time!

[gateofselidor]

I'm looking at this from my phone, which is where a lot of your readers are going to come from, and I think they grayscale makes the pages a lot more readable and dynamic. The characters blend into the background a bit in places on the pure b/w page, like on the long horizontal panel.

On a related note, your text is very small and difficult to read from a phone. The larger text could do with a thicker black outline, and at the very least the smaller text could use a larger size (and possibly the larger text too).

[rodrigohernadez]

I've never seen my own comic on a phone, so I didn't noticed the text size issue... I'll fix it on my coming pages.
About the caracters blending on the background, I think i can fix that with a ticker outline, but now i have a real reason to keep on using midtones.
Thanks for your feedback!

[dojo]

I'm seconding @gateofselidor about the grayscale being more readable, so I don't think you should stop doing that. If you don't mind my making the suggestion, maybe reducing some of the hatching like the grass and finding simpler ways to convey the texture so you can still tell you're looking at grass without having to spend nearly as much time rendering out elements of the environment like that, cuz I'm guessing that probably took a long time to do. I don't think you'ld be losing quality in doing that, and your pages wouldn't lose readability either.

[Jabbage]

I like the greyscale one best. I'd be careful not to overuse the gradients though, especially on the buildings. They look a little metallic to me, especially in the last panel. It works well for the windows, though!